::A Geek in Korea::

Our daughter had difficulty sleeping alone for a long time. She’s been getting better recently since her brother was born, and she’s been sleeping longer through the night. As long as someone spends some time with her as she goes to sleep reading or singing lullabies, she can sleep through the night. It’s been a long time coming. I had to move into her room while my son was born, because she couldn’t sleep alone, and I couldn’t sleep with a baby in the same room, but things are finally changing.

We’re trying to break the dependence our son has on sleeping near someone early, so we’re putting him in another room overnight. When he wakes up to be fed and cries, my wife will go out, but otherwise he’s sleeping independently for a few hours each night. The guttural moans of a child as he stretches or moves will keep a parent awake, but if he can learn how to settle himself it’ll be better for all of us. Now that my son is sleeping alone, my daughter has accepted that she too will need to sleep alone in her room. She’s finally accepted that, and she’s willing to try now. That change gets me off the floor, and back into a real bed! We’re getting closer to a normal sleeping arrangement in the house for a change. We tried this new setup for the first time tonight.

My daughter came out of her room proud in the morning stating, “I slept through the whole night, daddy.” She got a fatherly high-five for that one. My son is still a few hours from sleeping through the night, so my wife is still exhausted and requires a few naps to make it through the day while I watch the children, but we’re farther in two months than we were in nearly four years with our daughter. Progress!

We still need to figure out if we’re going to be converting a room for our son, buying a bunk bed setup, or finding some other solution to that, but there will be time for that.